💔💔💔Heartbreaking:Laura Tobin English Broadcast,Meteorologist and scientist Just Passed Away At the Aged of 42…see..more…
At the start of her career, Laura Tobin was adamant that she would never be a weather presenter. A trained meteorologist, she was sick of being asked “Are you going to be on TV?” as a joke, aware that it was a comment on her gender as much as her job. “They’re suggesting that you’re going to stand there, point at a screen, and not be credible,” she says.
Today, however, Tobin is a regular fixture on television screens across the UK. Since 2012, she has been a meteorologist and weather presenter for the broadcaster ITV. She says she is grateful she took a chance in her career: “You should never say never. It’s good to give something a go.”
Prepared for anything
Tobin’s career began with a degree in physics and meteorology at the University of Reading, which she completed in 2003. She actually failed the first year of her physics A level (the physics qualification she needed to go to university), but something “clicked” in her second year; she fell in love with the subject and did well in her final exams. “It’s integral to know physics to be able to forecast the weather,” says Tobin. “You need to be able to model the atmosphere and understand how it moves. The atmosphere is essentially a fluid so large parts of my degree were fluid dynamics.“
After graduating she joined the MET Office – the UK’s national meteorological service – as a forecaster. Based in Cardiff, Wales, her work was used to produce local weather services including radio bulletins and forecasts for renewable energy generation, road gritting and hill walking conditions.
This meant that long before she worked in front of a camera, Tobin had to present her work in a way that anyone could understand, which she says was a challenge at first. “When you’re taught scientifically about the weather you have to change the way you speak,” she says.
In her next role, Tobin had to adapt her forecasts to a very different audience. She worked at the Brize Norton Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, UK, where she briefed pilots on the weather conditions and delivered reports for the British Forces Broadcasting Service. However, it took her a while to be accepted into the team: “They used to ask me really ridiculous questions. They used to try and catch me out because they wanted to see if I knew what I was talking about because I was a girl and I was young”.
Luckily, Tobin did know what she was talking about. In fact, she has taken a positive lesson from the experience and says she still always over-prepares for any questions that might come her way.
Never say never
When she had been at Brize Norton for five years, Tobin heard that the BBC, a UK public service broadcaster, was recruiting television weather presenters. Despite her earlier misgivings, she decided to give it a go.
When she saw firsthand what the job entailed, she was shocked, “I realized that I had a misconception of what a TV weather presenter was,” she says. The television meteorologists were skilled broadcasters who could deliver regular weather reports in multiple genres, but they also had to understand the science behind everything they said, and they had to be ready to comment on everything from hurricanes to NASA launches.
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